Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems (Jun 2020)
Investigation of Food Supply Chain Sustainability Performance for Turkey's Food Sector
Abstract
Increasing product demands, environmental aspects, and overpopulation have an impact on the sustainability of a supply chain, especially in the food sector. In a food supply chain from production to consumption, there are many parameters (resources, packaging, waste management, etc.) that need to be taken into account for sustainability. The aim of this study is to determine the parameters affecting sustainable food supply chain management for the food sector and to measure the performance of the parameters along the supply chain. In this study, several performance indices and sub-criteria are defined by reviewing the indices previously discussed in the literature and accounting for expert opinions on the sustainable food supply chain. Customer satisfaction, resource utilization, product safety, innovation, reliability, company information, packaging, and waste management are defined as the parameters, as these are dimensions that should be improved in sustainable food supply chain management. The performance score for each dimension is calculated via Structural Equation Modeling and the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Customer satisfaction is calculated to have the highest performance, with a score of 86.23% in sustainable food supply chain management performance evaluation, followed by the product safety dimension, at 84.65%, while the performance index score of the reliability dimension is 82.97%, that of the packaging dimension is 78.81%, that of the company information dimension is 75.10%, that of resource utilization is 71.41%, and that of the waste management dimension is 67.83%. The sustainable food supply chain performance evaluation for the food sector in Turkey indicates that it has an overall performance of 79.7%. The results of this study include feedbacks on parameters in the food chain from agriculture to consumers.
Keywords
